_________________________________________________________________ Judges' 2000 Reviews _________________________________________________________________ Note: Judges reviews were optional. _________________________________________________________________ Contents: Sam Barlow's Reviews - Long (All) Ian Finley's Reviews (Cove, Galatea, Guitar) Doe's (Marnie Parker's) Reviews (All) Mike Roberts' Reviews - Long (All) About the Judges _________________________________________________________________ Sam Barlow's Reviews _________________________________________________________________ I'll start by explaining what I think the Art Show brief is so you know what I'm judging the games on. In one sentence: to take the conventions of IF and using them to produce not a game, but a modeling* of the writer's imaginary world. We should lose most of the puzzles, but have to rely on the strength of the rendering and of the image itself to hold the piece together. * not necessarily a "realistic" or scientific modeling. Also note that I'm probably quite harsh in a few of these reviews. I'm the type of person who if they dislike a game doesn't look hard for good things and in the same way, if I like a game I won't look hard for things that are wrong. None of the authors should be discouraged, but it's only fair that we judge on a level playing field, which means some games will fare worse than others. I would also point out that I myself have written an IF Art entry that was quite crap (which is why I never entered it). And so I'm all the more impressed that the authors of Cove and Galatea managed to look beyond the dangerous A word and produce some works that answer a few of the questions that Doe's show set out to ask. Anyhow, on with the show: (My reviews pretty much fell out of my head roughly in reverse order) Visitor. Visitor forsakes any detailed description of the scenery or any attempt at establishing presence in the room -- the author tries to stick us straight into a conversation. No problem there. My initial thoughts were that I would, undoubtedly, be expected to surprise myself with just how interesting this old woman was. We would maybe have a story recounted by the NPC -- an idea I have often had but never figured out how to implement -- However, there are a few problems. The conversation does not flow. It's hard to follow any path through it, beyond working your way through the names of her family and a few other key words. Then, there is little to talk about. Gladys has little to say and what she does say is quite uninteresting (her most responsive topic is her rheumatic joints). Any attempts to delve into her family's problems are fruitless. And finally, there seems to be no goal or progression. I never felt I was pursuing a conversation -- just kept plugging away to see if a topic would give an answer. I could never forget about the interface and involve myself in the IF because I never become involved. In the end, Gladys herself was quite uninteresting. Her default responses made her seem distant and vague. The lack of flow in the conversation was irritating and left me feeling that we hadn't bonded as much as the final score implied -- this was a very uncomfortable conversation full of pauses and stalled questions. I left Visitor without having learnt anything about me, about the old woman (save a family tree), about the author, about anything that I felt I should have been learning. So for me, this work remains a preparatory sketch. Perhaps in another competition the work would have fared better, but this is a competition after all and everything that Visitor does badly is made to look easy by Galatea. Guitar. As someone who knows nothing about guitars I could examine and mess about with a real guitar. With a virtual one, it seems, I am left to type in a list of commands given to me by the author. With Guitar of the Immortal bard we have the Art Show version of Time All Things Come To An End interaction destroyed by puzzle. But wasn't the guitar richly rendered? Not to me -- I don't know any of the "parts" of a guitar and so was limited to referring only to the guitar itself. And then when I read the author's list of parts there was no sense of it being rendered -- the fact that I was typing a walkthrough removed the dimension. Whereas in conventional IF it is easy to enjoy a game whilst using a walkthrough -- we can enjoy the plot and the details, scenery, characters, etc. whilst missing out on the puzzle satisfaction -- when a game is just the details, using a walkthrough removes the interactive part of the equation. For the fiction part, I wasn't sure what the point was, why all the magic and mystery. What was going on? What was the piece saying about music, nature, magic, mythology, tradition, story telling...? Back to the interaction then. Interaction does not happen without feedback. There was no feedback here. Just a list of descriptions of a guitar and some strange things that happen when you play the blues. No flow, no causality, no feeling whatsoever of presence in the fictive world. What I'm trying to say is that the interaction is very shallow. In a normal game interaction can become quite deep -- one thing leads to another, and we drill down into the game's world -- the longer the chain of interaction, the deeper the world. Here we either "examine" a bit of the guitar or "play" a guitar style. There is no way our interactions lead onto each other. They are all disjoint. As are the outcomes of the actions. Whatever order we do things in, we get the same responses -- this doesn't feel clever, this feels like a machine. We never get away from the fact that we are sitting in front of a virtual machine exchanging input for output. If we are losing the exploration of an IF world, losing the sense of interaction that puzzles bring then we must bring something new to the table. We should be interacting with the guitar, exploring it. Exploration and interaction require depth. Nothing is gained between moves here -- Nothing is done that could not be accomplished by splicing together the different descriptions*. As a closing note, I couldn't "strum" the guitar, which seemed unfair seeing as how that's all I can do with a guitar in reality. (there were some grammatical and punctuation issues but they were largely ignored in light of the problems I had with this piece) * before you point out that the same is true of Aisle that had meta-puzzles to play. There was progression in the reader's head. Sparky & Boots. Sparky and Boots offers a minimal description of the world and events. Interaction with the pets is linear and so feels scripted and false. These interactions are puzzles and very much so -- they are not motivated by a desire to explore and interact but by the desire to progress and "finish" this game (in my case). The animals had no personality -- Look to the dog in Losing Your Grip for an example of how well animals can be implemented. There seemed to be very little difference between the cat and the dog (maybe this is a problem with me though, cf: my review of Soft Food ). I personally really dislike it when live things (people, animals) are described as bog standard objects (You can see a carrot, a sword, Joe and Sue here or There are a rock, a cat and a gold coin here, etc) rather than having a special Initial or Describe quality (Joe is here, slumped against the wall. Sparky is sitting at your feet, etc.) I also dislike random messages. Put these two together and things look old fashioned. They drain the life out of the people/animals. And who would ever describe the scene as "You can see two animals (Sparky and boots)". Surely you would say "You can see Sparky and Boots". If we know their names then we know that they are animals, right? Custard. Of course this is Not What the Art Show is About , but it's a neat kind of trick. Unless, of course, what I saw was my interpreter packing in and this is just a boring game about a custard pie laced with acid. Art. I evo evo l l l o e v v e o l Apollinaire. So it was nice to see some calligrams (also strangely relevant; Apollinaire on his Calligrams: "they are an idealization of typographical precision at the dawn of new methods of reproduction, the cinema, the gramophone"). Not Art Show material though. Not IF. No presence, movement... Hardly interactive . Didn't irritate or bore me though. Statuette This was an Interesting one. Intriguing maybe . However sometimes the world was minimally described and had missing responses. Mysterious even . I wasn't sure about the end however -- After finding the music I smashed the animal because it was the only thing left to do, not because I wanted to get to the heart/music (which I think was the point?) But certainly more along the lines of the Art Show that some other entries -- Definitely an artist's vision/image rendered with the tools of traditional IF. And I was a little scared that the animal would come alive whilst I was touching it. Cove. Now we're cooking. A seascape, rendered nicely -- a few missing details and a bit of repetition with some of the animal activities, but very nicely crafted overall. Lots of actions implemented. Canned responses removed. Feels real. A kind of A Change in the Weather without ridiculous puzzles and on a beach. I felt that the inclusion of the plot was slightly muddled -- there maybe needs to be more rigor in terms of deciding what the piece is setting out to do. Though there is definitely a shared emotional dimension to the PC and to the location and atmosphere, so it doesn't not work. I think it's the intrusion of the character at the end of the story that has me thinking there's a problem -- the change from observing and remembering to suddenly being in the now and having things happen . Cove felt like Infocom games felt when I first played them -- "convincing" is the word. When I play Infocom games now, (mostly) they feel sparse and minimal but when I first played them they were rich, textured and dense. And that's where Cove is heading. Galatea. Enigmatic. Seductive. Mesmerizing. The thing that really interests me with traditional IF is the point where things become real -- when the combination of the engrossing text and the interaction make the experience Lucid dream-like and where reality and fiction become meshed slightly. Like the time I played Anchorhead and a flat mate asked if I wanted to go to the shops, but I said no because I didn't want to go out whilst it was raining. It wasn't raining in the real world. Galatea works like that. I really couldn't have been much more against it when I started playing -- having an Art Show entry in an art gallery seemed like such a cliche... and classical references; not in the mood for them, thank you. But, wow -- the conversation flows . Her personality seems alive -- she reacts to me, or so it appears (the appearance is all that matters here). There's tension between us -- the narrator -- and her. It's one of the best of the recent trend to incorporate IF conventions into the story/message/atmosphere of the text -- the narrator's disappointment when Galatea's responses run out and then her subsequent observation that real people get bored when you repeat questions is superbly done. There are lots of things to talk about and they lead into each other from all different angles. Our PC has presence, and personality. When I think of the sweat and tears (or maybe just sweat) put into their work by the AIF crowd, it's funny (though perhaps inevitable) that Galatea manages to be sexier, more interactive, more engrossing and more seductive an interactive toy (and that's what she is, until she steps off the pedestal) than any denizen of that field. I shan't go on much more about Galatea , shan't attempt to focus on any of it's themes -- the relationship between Art & Observer, beauty real & synthetic, the sensuality of sculpture, the line between entertainment & art -- because ultimately the thing that I enjoyed about Galatea was the experience , the raw suspension-of-disbelief, tactile and tangible rendering of the author's imaginings. The PC might have quite fancied her, but I loved Galatea. _________________________________________________________________ Ian Finley's Reviews _________________________________________________________________ Ok, forgive me, I'm a horrible review writer. These are the first real reviews I've written...ever, and I have no real format forgive me, I'm an actor, we aren't that good on organization. While I examined the whole of the work, my first criteria in judging was the completeness of the subject. If something was mentioned I wanted to touch it, to examine it in detail. Indeed if something could be inferred as having to exist I wanted to be able to look at it. And, for the most part I was pleasantly surprised by the completeness of the subjects. I've only written reviews for the games I voted for as best of their categories because finals are starting, but I hope to write out short reviews for all the pieces because they were all quite enjoyable, and surprisingly original. Congratulations to all the authors and thank you for giving me a LOVELY afternoon judging them. The Cove: What a joy! This and "Galatea" were both pieces that fully explored the interactivity of the subject, in this case a location. Everything mentioned could be examined or played with, but it wasn't merely pretty, this was also a full game involving a very moving plot and some of the mostly subtly drawn and compelling characters I've seen in ages. Shoe-in for a XYZZY nomination for Best PC. The only problem is that some of the actions are somewhat counter intuitive. Let me explain: You can fully explore the environment without "solving" much of anything, but to get the whole story requires you to do certain things that are occasionally a bit of a stretch. To warn you: you do have inventory to begin with and if a memory is mentioned, try to think or remember on the consecutive turn or the memory will pass. These semi-puzzles made it more difficult to see all there was to see, not because they were hard, but because they were subtle. However, in one sense these puzzles can also be very rewarding. The first "puzzle" of the game, which allows you to reach the beach from the cliff, I at first didn't realize was a puzzle, so until turn 36 I thought that the opening cliff was all there was to the game. But the moment when I went, "Aha!" and realized the obvious action to get down the slope was tremendously rewarding and one of my favorite moments of the competition. The game actually had several of these moments, like the coming of the storm, that practically had me putting exclamation marks after all of my commands. I would highly suggest this game, for it really is a game, not just an experiment, to anyone as a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. It fits in admirably with the line of fine short IF pieces that have been released lately and was utterly enjoyable. Ms. Fischer, promise us to write more! Galatea: Wow. Oh, wow. This sort of thing makes me become very jealous because the piece is everything I would want to write, and I didn't. I don't want to give much away in this review because the dozens of little moments of realization, from the first instant of knowing the identify of the PC in this portrait, to the twisting, post-modern ending, create a shocking and beautiful piece. And can we say complete? The NPC practically passes the Turing test, her moods change based on what you've said and done, she has multiple responses to anything you can think of and, she is aware of her limitations. Often times she will chide you for trying to test just how real she can be. This is the sort of paradoxical awareness of the illusion that makes me giggle like a school girl. And, like The Cove, this is a game as well as an experiment because progress can be made, in a very subtle, almost imperceptible way, but the progress is, to quote my notes "SO damn rewarding!" The pregnant pauses, the poetry, the punsoh, just download this game and play it. It's the most fulfilling short piece I've played to date and has left a definite impression on the way I approach IF. Mr. Cadre, Mr. Plotkin, meet Ms. Short. Watch her. Oh, and coincidence of the month: my brother turned on the TV while I was playing this piece and "My Fair Lady" was on the television. Eerie. The Guitar of the Immortal Bard: A beautiful still life, the focus was clearly on the guitar itself, the surrounding area forming a lovely frame. Every part of the guitar was described, simply and beautifully, the only shortcoming was the verbs allowed. You couldn't, for example, "strum" the guitar. However, you can "play" different styles of music, (another somewhat counter intuitive action, I had to check the hints to understand the necessary syntax, but then, I'm dim) each resulting in an evocative description. As a musician, I was particularly affected by this choice and found the piece, while small, an utterly lovely gem of an experience. Play it if you get a chance, it only takes a few moments to explore (the still life category creates, of necessity, smaller pieces than the others), you'll be pleased. _________________________________________________________________ Doe's (Marnie Parker's) Reviews _________________________________________________________________ Spoiler warning... I mean it, spoilers... Note: I was not a judge in the IF Art Show. This may seem a bit strange since the concept/contest is one I started, but I took myself out of the judging so I could answer questions up to the last minute and to be sure to keep the judging totally impartial. If I had voted... (reviews altered slightly from first publication) Best of Show / Best of Portrait Galatea by Emily Short Outstanding. A little less completely implemented than Cove, so for me Best of Show was a toss up, but this is an unusually interesting dialogue with an NPC. Galatea is the statue brought to life by Pygmalion, and she sits in a gallery, eerily alive, interviewable by the protagonist, an art reviewer. What an interesting concept! The natural stilted of NPCs, limited by our IF languages, is also used in service of the piece. Although alive, Galatea is a statue and a bit "wooden". This deliberate employment of NPC woodenness was extremely clever. But Galatea doesn't remain wooden, because her conversation is artfully constructed. She will respond to an amazing number of topics and the piece can end in more than one way. The player is cued about what to ask next by previous responses; the cuing is very well done. I especially liked being able to ask Galatea about: life, death, breathing, and food. "Hey, what's it like to be a statue?" You can also lead the conversation in several different directions, but this is where I found the piece slightly less effective. One time Galatea paused and said nothing further, another time when she paused she did say something more on the next turn, so I suspect that unfollowed up on pause was a "bug". Also I didn't find out I could tell Galatea about me, my childhood, until I asked her about the artist's childhood -- the disambiguation process is what tipped me off. Also when I started to take the conversation in one direction then switched mid-stream to different direction, I wasn't sure it always "worked." Although Galatea usually responded differently based on previous questions asked, sometimes she seemed inconsistent, but, actually, only sometimes. Overall, the conversation programming was outstanding. One really nice touch was that ask and tell were abbreviated to make a more involved conversation easier on the player. So I felt this only needed a bit more "polishing" to be flawless. Although the conversation technique is impressive, the subtext is even more fascinating. I discovered when I started telling Galatea about "me" that she was a great listener. As I treated her less like an object on display to be examined (she was also nicely touchable, etc.) and shared more with her, she shared more with me -- beautiful but slightly repugnant woman on pedestal transformed to real, warm woman. Galatea is the best NPC conversations I have seen. But as a feminist, the implicit message of, "Don't treat a woman like an object," is, naturally, what made this piece for me. Best of Show / Best of Landscapes Cove by Kathleen M. Fischer This is as much like walking along a beach as an all-text Interactive Fiction piece could be. All the scenery is very well-described and reminds me of beaches I have walked. It is also the most completely fleshed out and developed piece in the show, almost flawless, and I admire good crafting. I was impressed with how everything mentioned was an object I could examine further, either by: looking, touching, and/or smelling. Sea anemones, algae, on and on. And one object I thought I wouldn't be able to pick up, a starfish in the tidal pool, I could. I could even drop it, as it turns out, in an interesting and believable way. Also, the flying sea gulls, ornery sea lion, and fishing sea otter, added a great deal of verisimilitude, portraying the liveliness of nature. As Galatea buries a subtext in conversation, Cove buries a plot in a walk. Although this is not an NPC entry, there is a character in this period piece, the female protagonist. An romantic old-fashioned woman, as her turn-of-the-century clothes attest. Using her to "frame" the experience of exploring the beach also gives the player a story to explore, a very effective technique. Walking along a beach can be a time for reflection. Our protagonist uses it to reflect on a past love. But what starts as an-idle-along, take-your-time, meandering beach walk and trip down memory lane soon becomes more frantic with the onslaught of pounding, slashing rain and... pounding, painful memories. The juxtaposition of the two emphasizes both, and gives this piece its poignancy. This piece also can end in more than one way. Unfortunately, that is where I encountered some problems. They weren't problems of bugginess or guess the verb, but problems of pacing. I had no problem discovering the "special verb", but I thought maybe it shouldn't be tied to specific locations, more to events. However, my main problem is I got stuck in the tunnel because the memory that would have clued me in on what to do seemed to occur later. In other words, I needed to be tipped off sooner. I also needed more of a hint about the exit. --------- One additional comment that may seem a bit strange, but I'll make it anyway. For me it was very much a toss up between Galatea and Cove for Best of Show. However, all the judges were male, and for most of them Galatea was the clear choice. I had to stop and think about that, because it surprised me. Then I finally realized that, for once, I had really enjoyed playing a FEMALE . Especially one I knew was written by a female (there may be more female protagonists written by females out there, I just haven't played them yet). A protagonist that actually "felt" female to me. My feeling of direct participation in exploring the Cove was contrasted to my more remote appreciation of playing a male that was obviously attracted to an impressive Galatea. When I stopped to analyze it, I found my gender reaction very, very interesting, so I thought it worth mentioning. All I can say is I am glad I didn't have to choose between Ms. Short and Ms. Fischer. Well, that's not all, I hope they both write a LOT more IF. Best of Still Life - The Guitar of the Immortal Bard by Jason Burns This is less involved than Galatea or Cove, almost by necessity, because a still life is naturally less complicated than a landscape or portrait, but it is still outstanding in its own right. The player finds a "magical" guitar that will play different kinds of music. No music lessons are required. The help screens are used very effectively in this piece to let the player know the parts of a guitar (each is examinable), and what kind of music can be played. Each type of music has a description that literally, and sometimes magically, soars. While I am not very musical, I am auditory (re: Iffy Theory ;-)), so I swear could almost "hear" each song/ballad/riff. The only problem I found was sometimes not having a blank line before the prompt and between paragraphs, (highly visual I notice things like that, probably too much), but that is only a quibble. It could also have been a bit more interactive, although I have no recommendations how that could have been achieved. I am not sure how those unfamiliar with a guitar could have been lead to examine its parts without help. But the music descriptions were excellent and definitely made me want to "play more". Maybe someone with a better musical ear than I would disagree, but I felt this really captured the essence of various types of music. In an all-text medium that is quite a feat. Honorable Mention for Unusual Exploration of Interactivity - Untitled by Gunther Schmidl Gunther is different. Gunther does different things. This is different. A fun, highly visual, somewhat interactive, intuitive word play. Poetry, word pictures, and combination thereof. Play it, I can't describe it. But I am seriously thinking of adding a Gunther category to the next IF Art Show. Except I'll call it something else, so people not named Gunther may also enter that category. (Note: I did not consider these word pictures to be actual ASCII art, although they bordered on it.) The Visitor by Peter Polkinghorne This is a gentle, low-key piece about befriending an elderly person who lives in a nursing home. Not a bad implementation of an NPC conversation. Although the artist probably thought he couldn't have separate takeable objects in a NPC piece (he could have), I would have preferred that Gladys' family photos could have been showable to Gladys one by one. Or personal things from her cupboard. As it was, it took me a while to hit on the one thing that would get Gladys talking (looking through the window). Then it was fairly easy to keep her talking, as new topics were well cued by her previous responses. Also, Gladys responded with additional information to the same topic on subsequent queries. Well done. This piece can also end in more than one way. However, I felt it needed a bit more fleshing out to be able to fully stand on its own. Maybe more of a dialogue/relationship between the protagonist and subject, although sometimes old people do tend to ramble on. Maybe takeable objects to show to Gladys, or more of a "story" in what she said. It could have been more fully developed in several ways. But Gladys still had a quiet charm. Sparky and Boots by James Bernsen The author demonstrated he can write, program, and debug. I found no serious flaws, although I couldn't get Sparky and Boots to move to the living room. This may have been a bug, or it may have been because I didn't do things in exactly the right order. Because this piece suffered from having too many sequential puzzles. Yes, the ban on puzzles was lifted, but the rules also state "encourage the player to explore". Exploration is the key word. So while this was an adequate implementation of NPCs, it was not something I would consider especially "iffy arty". To explain how I think it could have been IF Art will be difficult. But I'll try. Sequential puzzles stop the player again and again, stopping exploration. I didn't get very far each time. Without the help screens I wouldn't have been able to explore. So in this piece, the help screens ended up dominating, and by that very fact, subtracting from my experience. I would have found it more "iffy arty", if what was in the help screens had been put into the piece instead . In other words, Sparky and Boots themselves gave me very little indication about what to do next. More and varied behavior (even if slightly unrealistic), might have clued me in. Also, it could have been made more challenging or experiential, if it had been written with no puzzles at all. I suggest the author try it some time. I have and have discovered writing "puzzleless IF" makes me rethink what a puzzle is . But, IF Art considerations aside, I can easily see Sparky and Boots fitting into a larger game. Custard by Evin Robertson When Evin emailed me his entry he said he hoped it was sufficiently weird. I probably should let that comment stand. But I'll say a little more -- after a specific event took place I couldn't see well enough to find out if there was any more to do. However, that may have been the point, I simply couldn't decide. So, yes, it was sufficiently weird. The Statuette by Ian Ball Unfortunately, I felt this was seriously flawed. It had misspellings, poor spacing (before the prompt), and the strange appearance of question marks where apostrophes should be -- but those weren't the flaw. There is an interesting concept submerged in this statue, but it took me awhile to bring it to the surface and even then I wasn't sure I fished it all out. I would have liked more things to be examinable (surface, substance), and more verbs to be implemented (penetrate pool, put hand in pool, enter pool, drink pool), so I could have been more positive I had seen all of the concept. Also, although the poetry was good, I couldn't really connect it that much with the subject of the statue. So the flaw was -- although the statue was interesting to explore, to me the concept was "muddy"or not fully realized -- or not clear enough for me to "get it". (Reading Sam Barlow's reviews, I know now I didn't see it all, but I also have no idea what I could have done to see more.) Therefore, my main reaction to this piece was that it had potential, but needed a lot more polishing. _________________________________________________________________ It is hard for me to give negative feedback, especially within the framework of the IF Art Show, because I am the hostess and certainly don't want to discourage entries. So I hope all the artists take any negative comments I made in context, as me honestly trying to say what I thought worked and what I thought didn't. I was very happy to receive and play all the entries and am delighted that the IF Art Show is a place where people can not only experiment, but also get their "feet wet" iffy-wise. Thanks to all the entrants for entering! Thanks to all the judges for judging! Doe :-) _________________________________________________________________ Mike Roberts' Reviews _________________________________________________________________ Index to the Reviews Untitled by gunther schmidl The Cove by Kathleen M. Fischer Custard by Evin Roberston Galatea by Emily Short Guitar of the Immortal Bard by Jason Burns Sparky and Boots by James Bernsen The Statuette by Ian Ball The Visitor by Peter Polkinghorne _________________________________________________________________ Untitled by gunther schmidl The best term I can think of to describe this piece is "word paintings," not in the sense of descriptions that create visual images in the mind of the reader but rather more literally: Art draws pictures out of letters. Superficially, the pictures are just ASCII graphics * , but there's another layer in the way the letters used to draw the pictures also form words that in most cases refer back to the pictures they draw. There are no puzzles here in the usual sense - user interaction is limited to selecting one of the drawings by pressing a numbered key - but the pictures take a little thinking to interpret, in a way reminiscent of those word games that encode obscure messages in arrangements of letters, such as 0 ----- MBA BA PhD MS MD The piece also seems to have some underlying theme, although I wasn't able to discern it beyond vague generalities. World Wars I and II are referenced pretty directly in one place, a few of the other screens are war references of one kind or another, there's a Pink Floyd reference that could conceivably point very indirectly to war; but it's hard to find the connections in other screens. Perhaps there's a larger meta-puzzle of piecing together an overarching meaning from the smaller puzzles. This piece is worth a look for the experience of noticing that there's more to it than first meets the eye. How much more is something we are left to ponder. ______________________________________________________________ *For those who weren't using computers back before today's modern internet age, "ASCII graphics" are pictures drawn out of text characters. In the days of text-only terminals, it wasn't possible to show JPEG's or other graphics on most computers, so some people made drawings out of letters and numbers. This was obviously very low-resolution, and usually monochrome, but it was the only way to show graphics on a lot of systems. ASCII graphics even showed up in interactive fiction once in a while, although it always seemed out-of-character to me. _________________________________________________________________ The Cove by Kathleen M. Fischer This piece describes itself as "an interactive seascape," but that's a bit of a ruse; the setting's true purpose is to serve as a medium for telling the player character's story. That's not to say that the setting isn't well-developed - the map is small, but the locations are deeply described, with every description leading to several others at successively greater magnifications. The detailed setting, though, serves as more than just a picture to look at. Everything we look at is seen through the player character's eyes, and what the player character sees reveals the character's story. We have a sense of discovery as we gradually assemble the character's story from the jigsaw puzzle pieces. It is an effective device; rather than just dumping back-story on us in the introduction or after some important scene, the work reveals the PC's personality, history, and current situation incrementally. This is not an unprecedented device, but it is executed well here, and is especially interesting to see isolated like this, with the story revealed principally through exploration of the setting, rather than through events and actions. This work does thoroughly constrain the player's actions, forcing us to move along a narrow course; this creates a plot of sorts, since we must see things in a particular order. This aspect makes the work quite linear (in the interactive fiction sense), which is a counterpoint to the non-linearity (in the traditional static fiction sense) of the way the character's story is revealed. One minor complaint I might make is that the work is less than forthcoming about one unusual verb that must be used several times to get the story's full effect. I'm not even sure how I hit upon it, because it's not one of the "standard" verbs and not one I usually think to try. It has become common for authors to disclose any unusual verbs or other user interface quirks they employ in a brief set of instructions before the introduction or in response to a "help" command, which is part of a larger (and, in my opinion, good) trend away from the once-prevailing attitude that figuring out the user interface is part of the fun; given that this work's focus isn't puzzles, I doubt it would spoil anyone's enjoyment for the game to disclose the verb at the outset. (Nonetheless, I won't actually reveal what the verb is here, except to say that I've used it somewhere in this paragraph.) _________________________________________________________________ Custard by Evin Robertson This work was entered in the "Portrait/NPC" category of the show, but its only non-player character is a cardboard cut-out - I don't mean to say the player is two-dimensional, or flat, or not well-developed, I mean that the NPC is literally a piece of cardboard. Which is well in keeping with the rest of this work, where nothing is as it leads you to expect. The game's introductory screen asks for your name, which it promptly throws away and replaces with one of its own choosing. Most of the game must be played in an especially irritating display mode in which all of the blank space on the screen is filled with scrolling garbage text. And the "custard" of the title is the gateway to a psychedelic trip. I'm not sure it's "art," but it's kind of amusing. _________________________________________________________________ Galatea by Emily Short This work presents an amazing counter-example to the opinion I have formed that the traditional "ask/tell" conversation system never creates the illusion of personal involvement in a conversation. Galatea proves that it's possible after all. This work consists almost solely of conversation with the non-player character of the title. The story that unfolds during the conversation is intriguing, and the world in which the story is set is richly imagined and detailed; the story world has many surprises, so I won't say much about it here except that it reminds me a little of some of Gene Wolfe's extreme-future science fiction. This is the first time I've seen an "ask/tell" system * produce such a convincing illusion of actual conversation. In ask/tell games, I almost never feel any sense of involvement in conversations; I feel as though I'm a tourist in a country where I don't speak the language, and my ability to communicate is limited to pointing at things. The effect for me is very distancing; I don't feel as though I'm really interacting with the characters at all. This distancing effect is usually compounded by the statelessness of most ask/tell conversations. The non-player characters are busily going about their business (which might be just sitting there blocking the entrance to the treasure room), and if we ask them a question (or, rather, point at something and shrug), we merely attract their attention long enough to elicit a response; the character immediately returns to its scripted activities. The scripted activities are frequently so incompatible with conversation that one almost has the sense that there are two characters in the room - one going around vacuuming the floor or blocking the door or whatever, and another one who pops into existence long enough to respond to a point-and-shrug, then immediately vanishes again. Real conversations are full of state and context. If I ask you a question, you might answer it, but you might also then ask me why I wanted to know, or you might ask me how I learned about some part of what I was asking, or what I thought of your response. Ask/tell conversations don't normally have any sort of this give-and-take. The conversation in Galatea does several things that go a long way toward creating the illusion of real conversation, using only a traditional ask/tell system. I'm impressed to see that it actually can be done. Perhaps the most obvious thing that this work does to produce a good conversation is also the most difficult: the character simply responds to lots and lots of topics. The limited horizons of the setting probably help some here, but the range of topics is quite large anyway because many elements of the conversation suggest new topics. This work also uses a simple but effective technique that dispels a lot of my mute-foreigner feelings: when the player types an "ask" or "tell" command, the work doesn't merely show the character's response, but first shows the question that the player character is asking, in the player character's words. While we as the player can't introduce nuances into our questions, since we're limited to the simple "ask" syntax, the player character can and does, by asking actual questions in conversational language. This technique can only work in a game with a well-defined player character, and in fact the player character's questions prove to be an amazingly powerful mechanism for defining his character, and they even help tell the overall story. Some players are sure to object to the idea of having words put in their mouths, but I find the effect to be very involving. There also seems to be some internal context to the discussion, as though the character is actually paying attention to us and knows she's conversing with us. This conversation does not feel as stateful as a real conversation, but it's certainly not as stateless as a typical ask/tell interaction. I would like to see this area explored more fully, because I can see the beginnings of it in this work, but I think there's even more potential. I certainly don't mean to encourage authors to add more puzzles of the kind where you have to ask the troll about the treasure nine times in a row to make him finally relent - that's not the kind of statefulness I'm talking about. I'm talking about the way natural conversations have a sort of shared agreement on what the topic is at any given time; the topic shifts and changes as the conversation evolves, but each party usually has some idea of where the conversation is and where it's going, and whose turn it is to speak and what sort of thing they're expected to say. I've mostly talked about the conversation mechanics, but I don't want to leave the impression that Galatea is merely a technical achievement. This is a wonderful piece of interactive fiction with great writing and a fascinating story. ______________________________________________________________ *The "ask/tell" system is one of the conventional forms of non-player character interaction that we find in many works of interactive fiction. Computers are as yet not able to mimic actual natural language conversation well enough to fool even the most credulous users, so IF authors have had to find other ways to allow players to interact with characters. Ask/tell is one of these approaches. In an ask/tell system, the player converses by using commands of the form "ask character about topic " and "tell character about topic ." _________________________________________________________________ Guitar of the Immortal Bard by Jason Burns This is a simple but competent still-life piece. The work is centered on an exquisite guitar we find in a forest. We can examine the guitar, including all of the parts one would expect to find on a guitar, and we can play different kinds of music with the guitar. This work didn't feel very interactive to me, even though we can do the usual things with the guitar - examine it in detail, tune it, play music on it. I think the reason is that the work relies on a "help" command to list the different things to look at and the types of music to play. I don't mean to suggest that simply removing the help command would help matters. This work with the help command is hugely preferable to the same work without it; removing the help message would transform this into a "guess-the-genre" puzzle, which would be no different than a guess-the-verb puzzle. I suppose, though, that the game might feel more interactive if the information we need to explore the possible genres and parts of the guitar were given to us within the context of the setting, rather than as an add-on to the user interface. "Help" is clearly a system command - when using it we are acting in the persona of the player, not of the player character. I can think of a couple of ways of moving the "help" information more into the story context. For the guitar parts, the usual technique of having inspection of the guitar lead to the guitar's main parts, and inspection of a part lead to its sub-parts, seems like it would work. For the music genres, perhaps the forest setting could be divided into more locations, each of which suggests a particular genre to the player character. (I'm not suggesting that the player would have to figure out, as a puzzle, what genre a location suggests, but simply that each location might suggest something to the player character , and that this information would be relayed to the player via the location's description. This might even offer a chance to flesh out the player character, since the associations that the character makes between setting and music might reveal memories or personality traits.) _________________________________________________________________ Sparky and Boots by James Bernsen This is a character simulation, where the characters are a puppy and a kitten. We can interact with the animals by playing with them, feeding them, and petting them. The simulation doesn't go very deep, but there's enough to explore for a little while. As a game, this simulation would need a little work to remove some odd bits of feedback that make the behavior of the animals a little confusing. For example, once we do something to get the puppy interested in a toy, the puppy "watches you intently," but if you try giving the puppy the toy, he "could care less" about it. Also, we must repeat some actions to get the desired effect, but there's no feedback to tell us that the repetition is intensifying anything, or that anything needs intensifying in the first place. Fortunately, the work has on-line hints, so these rough spots in the puzzle-like parts don't get in the way for long; but it would be better if the hints were unnecessary. I was little disappointed that the puppy's behavior is essentially identical to the kitten's, the only differences being which objects they're interested in. The two also have no interaction with one another. _________________________________________________________________ The Statuette by Ian Ball This is a small and unusual work involving a "virtual statuette." We can look at the sculpture and its parts, and we can use other senses as well. The "virtual" aspect seems to be that the statuette changes in subtle ways as we observe it. Why or how it changes is not made clear; the work doesn't even draw attention to the changes, but lets us notice on our own. This piece has a few interesting tricks, but I really don't know what it all means. _________________________________________________________________ The Visitor by Peter Polkinghorne This piece is a fairly standard NPC conversation, where the non-player character is an elderly woman whom we're visiting. I'm not sure what the relationship between the player character and the NPC is meant to be, but we can ask questions about her family and her past. The conversation is implemented competently, with a good range of topics to ask about. Most of the topics have several different replies that we can elicit by asking repeatedly; there's no direct indication that asking again would give us more information, but we can easily tell that we've reached the last reply when the reply starts repeating. The elderly woman's life story doesn't hold a lot of surprises, but the character is fairly well drawn and the responses stay consistently in character. _________________________________________________________________ About the Judges _________________________________________________________________ Other judges' profiles to be filled in... Mike Roberts - Created TADS (Text Adventure Development System) , an IF programming language and compiler. He is currently taking it through several exciting additions: HtMLTads and TADS Workbench, an integrated graphical system. We can thank, first AGT, next TADS, and later, Inform, for keeping IF alive and kicking today. Mike also wrote the games: "Ditch Day Drifter", "Perdition's Flames" and "The Plant", which placed third in the 1998 Annual IF Competition. Lucian P. Smith (lpsmith) - Author of "Edifice", which placed first in the 1997 Annual IF Competition, has coordinated the IF Comp Beta Testers for the last two years. While his innovative IF Bookclub is already on its second selection. Emulating a book reading group, one IF game is played/discussed monthly or every two months. Lucian also posts Inform programming tips. _________________________________________________________________